David Lose2015-03-03T15:15:29-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=david-loseCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David LoseGood old fashioned elbow grease.Is Biblical Marriage a House of Cardstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.67664762015-02-27T15:13:26-05:002015-02-27T15:59:01-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/don't want me to do that."

He knows, you see, that such requests usually come from more conservative congregations who hope and expect him to confirm their views about marriage. The difficulty is that such assumptions often derive more from 19th century Victorianism than they do the Bible.

Indeed, if you want to find a contemporary model that exemplifies the understanding of marriage expressed in the Bible, you need look no further than Netflix's Emmy-award winning political drama, House of Cards. While I realize that Frank and Claire Underwood -- the scheming, ruthless, and fairly amoral couple at the center of the series -- hardly seem paragons of biblical virtue, hear me out.

Here's the thing: Influenced by contemporary notions of love and family, we find it easy to forget that marriage in the ancient world -- the world in which the Bible was written -- was far more a legal, rather than romantic, affair. Marriage, in other words, was a contract entered into by two parties in order to guarantee the security and future of their households. And so marriage partners were just that, partners committed to advancing their shared fortunes at any cost.

Witness, for instance, the peculiar behavior of Abraham and Sarah who, not just once, but actually twice, conspire to deceive a local political leader about their relationship. Fearing that, first, the Pharaoh of Egypt (ch. 12) and, later, the king of Gerar (ch. 20) will desire Sarah and potentially kill Abraham to possess her, Abraham and Sarah agree to tell these kings that she is his sister rather than his wife. In other words, both agree that it would be better for their long-term security if these kings have their way with Sarah rather than kill Abraham and end any hope of establishing their line of descendants. In each account, the rulers fall for it, not only sparing Abraham's life but treating him well for Sarah's sake.

Interestingly, when the sham falls apart -- because the Lord intervenes to keep the rulers from consummating their desires with Sarah -- it is the duped kings rather than the Lord who are upset with Abraham. They feel deceived, even used, but there is no evidence of remorse on the part of Abraham and Sarah, only weak excuses contrived to preserve their hides and, more importantly, the possibility of having descendants and furthering their.

Sound familiar? Abraham and Sarah are committed to pursuing their ambitions no matter the price. Similarly, Claire and Frank are completely aligned in their pursuit of power. So while Claire may not enjoy the prospect of Frank sleeping with journalist Zoe Barnes, she nevertheless sees the value of it and therefore not only consents to it, but also discusses with him the developments of his illicit, but sanctioned, relationship.

Does this chillingly pragmatic approach to marriage make their relationship a sham? Not at all, according to the show's creator, Beau Willimon, who in a 2014 interview with USA Today said, "What's extraordinary about Frank and Claire is there is deep love and mutual respect, but the way they achieve this is by operating on a completely different set of rules than the rest of us typically do." Surprisingly, those rules may be more similar to those found in the Bible than in modern-day America.

Which isn't to say that all is smooth sailing in such relationships. When Claire feels left out of Frank's plotting, she vents her frustration by taking up with photographer Adam Galloway. When she reconciles with Frank and that dalliance proves threatening, however, she is not above destroying her former lover. In a similar fashion, while Sarah initially despairs of bearing children and urges Abraham to have a child with her slave Hagar, she later resents and abuses Hagar (ch. 16). Life as ambitious partners is not without emotional ups and downs!

But it is a partnership. And that's what's central -- two people who are willing to do just about anything to advance their shared future. So while the relationship between Frank and Claire Underwood has often been compared to that of Shakespeare's Lord and Lady Macbeth, as you watch the next season, you might also be reminded of Abraham and Sarah. Or, for that matter Isaac and Rebekah, or Jacob and Rachel (and Leah!), or David and Michal (and Abigail and Bathsheba and...). Well, you get the idea.

Christians and Jews have been reading the Scriptures for moral guidance for millennia. But rather than expecting to lift precepts directly from the Bible's pages, we may need to read it -- as I've argued before -- "sideways," looking for general principles that may be exemplified by specific rules, but also may be contradicted and correct. All of which makes offering pronouncements about what constitutes biblical marriage a rather dicey venture, as the Bible's portrayal of marriage as a legal contract differs markedly from some of our own conceptions.

If any of this makes you uncomfortable, perhaps it's worth remembering that the world from which the Bible came could little afford the luxury of romantic love. People forged relationships based on pragmatic calculation, common interests, and shared ambition because the world they inhabited was unpredictable, even hostile, and offered precious few promises of survival. Kind of like the world of political intrigue and power depicted in House of Cards. Enjoy season three!]]>Oprah, Atheists, and the Gift of Ambiguitytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.41505022013-10-24T15:31:00-04:002013-12-24T05:12:02-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/
Nyad, who had recently completed a 53-hour solo swim from Cuba to Florida, was being interviewed by Oprah on her Super Soul Sunday program. At one point during the interview she said very clearly, "I am an atheist," and then continued by saying, "I can stand at the beach's edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist, go on down the line, and weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity. All the billions of people who have lived before us, who have loved and hurt and suffered. So to me, my definition of God is humanity and is the love of humanity."

To which Oprah replied, "Well, I don't call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is. That is what God is. It's not a bearded guy in the sky."

Few suspect that Oprah meant her words to be heard as anything other than accepting and affirming, an attempt, perhaps, to bridge any gap that Diana Nyad might have felt between herself and Oprah because of their distinct viewpoints about the existence of God. Oprah was trying to say, in essence, "we're not that different, you and I."

But that's exactly what has upset a number of atheists. They do not see the difference between them and believers as a gap that needs to be bridged. They want to be seen as both different and acceptable. They don't, in other words, want their convictions reduced to some slightly different, if more generic, from of religious faith, as if only the religious can feel awe. Rather, they desire to be respected not just in spite of but even for their disbelief.

And who can blame them? In our contemporary culture, atheists regularly rate as among the most distrusted persons in society because of their lack of belief in God. For this reason, Oprah's gesture of acceptance felt more like condescension...or worse. As Chris Stedman, author of the recent Faitheist and humanist chaplain at Harvard commented, "Winfrey's response may have been well intended. But it erased Nyad's atheist identity and suggested something entirely untrue and, to many atheists like me, offensive: that atheists don't experience awe and wonder."

In the minor furor that has erupted around Winfrey's remarks, it seems to me, lies one of the more profound and important challenges of living in our increasingly pluralistic world. How do we accept as fully human those persons who disagree with us profoundly, those whose very beliefs may, in fact, seem to call into question our own? Can we, in other words, genuinely respect those whose worldview seems utterly irreconcilable to our own? This isn't only a question for Christians or, for that matter, the religious. When Richard Dawkins calls into question the credibility of a reporter because of his Muslim faith, Dawkins similarly gives the impression that he has a hard time understanding how anyone who views the world differently than he does can be considered truly intelligent or educated.

Problems arise for both believers and atheists alike, I would suggest, when we need or expect our beliefs and viewpoints to be validated by their acceptance by others. While the scientific worldview birthed in the Enlightenment has yield tremendous gains, perhaps an unfortunate and unintended consequence of modernity is our unquestioned acceptance of rational proof as the ultimate criteria in all matters, scientific or not. Once you've stamped QED to a proposition, be it mathematical or philosophical, there is little room for debate and every objection threatens the integrity of the proof. So whether the question at hand is "At what temperature does water boil?" or "What is the meaning of life?", when your only standard is indisputable proof, disagreement is always and only oppositional.

But what if we reclaimed a sense that belief in God -- or, for that matter, disbelief in God -- is less a matter of proof than it is confession: a willingness to give one's good reasons and evidence for one's views but also to surrender a claim to final proof. In this approach to articulating views, the boldness of a well-reasoned conviction is also and always accompanied by a commensurate acceptance that some things are ultimately beyond proof.

When one shifts from a desire to prove a viewpoint or belief to a desire to articulate and confess it, differences no longer need to alienate because the validity of one's confession doesn't rest in its acceptance by another but in the integrity of the confession itself. And the moment we stop seeing the agreement of others as necessary for our own validity becomes the moment we can accord them their own dignity and full humanity as persons, persons who don't exist to validate our beliefs but instead stand as beautiful and worthy in their own distinctiveness.

If we can shift from a necessity to prove to a desire to confess, then we discover not only how to "tolerate" each other -- which all too often feels like another form of condescension -- but also how to appreciate and value each other as distinct persons. While we may not agree, yet we may find in the beliefs of others ideas that challenge, stretch, and perhaps even strengthen our own.

Further, no longer impeded by a need either to overcome or assimilate the distinctiveness of another, we may be able to find meaningful common ground on which to work together on the pressing problems of the day. For instance, had Oprah simply valued and identified with Diana Nyad's expression of awe and wonder at the world instead of reducing it to a slightly different but essentially similar expression of faith as her own, then the conversation might have moved on to how they could work together to save this precious world that elicits wonder from one and belief from another.

To move in this direction, however, requires the capacity to live with ambiguity, and such a commodity seems strikingly rare of late. We live in a culture that prefers black and white clarity to the grey hues of ambiguity. We value certainty over discernment, absolute knowledge over tentative belief, and the illusion of stability that dogmatism (of the religious and non-religious types) offers in response to the perceived threat of chaos some fear ambiguity portends. I suspect that as our nation becomes ever more diverse, regularly confronting us with people who think and believe differently than we do, our penchant to seek out certainty at any cost will only increase. But that is not our only option. We are free to take delight in the more challenging but also more creative space living with ambiguity makes possible.

Ultimately, I don't believe for a moment that Oprah meant anything by her statement except to be welcoming, accepting, and hospitable. For this very reason, however, she provides us with a helpful example of how a well-intentioned person of faith can unintentionally erase the identity of another person who believes differently. She is, of course, not alone. I suspect most of us have made similar mistakes and likely will again. But if we can refuse the false comfort of absolutism, perhaps we can make that mistake less frequently and create room for genuine conversation and creative collaboration at a time when the world desperately needs more of both.]]>The Gospel According to 'Game of Thrones'tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33959952013-06-06T11:47:59-04:002013-08-06T05:12:01-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/David Gibson of the Religious News Service recently asked what I take to be an intentionally provocative question: "Can a Christian watch A Game of Thrones?" My short answer: certain kinds of Christians can, while others most definitely should not.

Allow me to explain. First and foremost, there is no more one kind of Christian any more than there is one kind of Muslim, Jew or atheist. And the recent furor in Christian circles about George R. R. Martin's magical and medieval-like world of Westeros reveals one of the unspoken dividing lines between two very different understandings of Christianity.

For some, Christianity is the answer to a problem, indeed, to many problems: addiction, lawlessness, debauchery and more. This is the version of Christianity that has dominated the religious imagination of America in recent years, stringing together a host of otherwise disparate Christian traditions that run the gamut from the "family values" morality of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the "prosperity gospel" of Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen. Its unifying tenent: Christianity restores righteousness and order to a chaotic world and promises stability and success (whether moral or economic) to those who adhere to it.

Another version of Christianity also recognizes the world and human existence as unruly and chaotic, but rather than imagining that Christian faith eliminates the tremors, it offers its adherents instead only the ability to keep their footing amid the vibrations. This kind of Christianity raises more questions than it answers and makes few promises beyond saying that there is more to this story we are living than meets the eye and that hope often emerges from unexpected quarters.

Which is where "A Game of Thrones" comes in. While Martin has been castigated by conservative columnists like Jonathan Ryan for his apparent lack of a moral vision and unrealistically grim view of human nature, others like George Schmidt have embraced Martin's realism as an accurate portrayal of human nature and the consequent necessity for embracing, after the fashion of Reinhold Niebuhr's Augustinian realism, the logic of the world in order to advance the values of the kingdom. Moreover, as Jim McDermott points out, the story hinges not only on the fortunes of the rich and powerful but also on "the journeys of those on the margins," a characteristic that runs through the biblical drama as well.

So if you are a Christian that seeks from your faith a narrative that divides the world neatly into the righteous and the unrepentant and provides an unerring guide to the moral demands of the day, you will likely find Martin not just upsetting but downright offensive. Don't get me wrong: Martin's characters aren't nearly as morally ambiguous as many would make out. Very few, I'm willing to wager, root for Petyr Baelish, want Gregor Clegane to prevail, or wish Tywin Lannister had been their father. Similarly, we earnestly hope Jon Snow finds acceptance, Tyrion flourishes, and Daenerys triumphs. Many of Martin's characters, while perhaps more complex than those of the other "R. R." to which he is regularly compared, nevertheless often fall into clearly demarcated camps.

What's disturbing isn't Martin's characters but rather his universe. For here is a world where purity of heart -- embodied, for instance, by Ned Stark -- is not necessarily rewarded. In fact, it is precisely Ned's rigidity of values and naïve if admirable principles that make him such easy prey for the unscrupulous likes of Littlefinger. And this is where Martin truly is, if not a Christian realist, at least very much a secular one. For even though I would cringe with disappointment and curse Martin's authorial cruelty after scenes such as Ned's beheading or the red wedding, it usually took only a few moments for me to acknowledge with a modicum of grudging admiration, "But, damn, that's probably what would have happened."

Which is what makes Martin's larger series, "A Song of Ice and Fire," both disappointing and threatening to conservative Christians who understand redemption as the triumphant restoration of order: Martin's world remains irreparably chaotic, a place where power is everything and the game of thrones is all.

Except it's even more than that. For behind the ordered universe of conservative Christianity is a law-giving, judgment-dealing deity who rewards virtue and punishes vice and, in the ultimate imposition of order, will eventually divide humanity into the saved and the damned. Martin's world is noticeably absent any such God. Or rather, it is populated by many gods, and the seriousness and sympathy with which he portrays the devotion of various characters to each is unsettling. Placed along side each other, the various faiths threaten to negate each other and urge a relativistic view of religion altogether.

Which might be just why I love Martin's work so much. He refuses to allow religion to save the day. While it may provide comfort to some, it just as often legitimizes the grab for power by others. Religion itself, in other words, is as morally ambivalent as politics, and Martin's universe yields no unambiguous path to salvation from religion any more than it offers the promise of justice from politics. Self-interest -- or what the Protestant Reformers called the state of incurvates in se (literally, "being curved in on oneself") -- would seem to rule all.

Are Ryan's charges, then, that Martin views the world through "one jaundiced, damaged eye" accurate? I don't think so. I suspect that what confuses Ryan and others is that redemption isn't found in religious piety, doctrine or morality. Rather, redemption -- or at least the possibility of redemption -- is found only at the edges of the story far from the most religious or powerful. As McDermott notes, Martin's story is populated by unlikely heroes who take the form of "Bastards and midgets, orphans and prisoners, a crippled boy, a lost little girl, a gigantic, mannish warrior woman," and others similarly unlikely to arouse confidence.

What unites all these characters is not only the improbability of their triumph but also their sheer vulnerability, and even weakness, in the game of thrones. The heroes Martin invites us to root for are neither particularly strong, nor consistently principled, nor especially beautiful. Rather, they are the cast offs, the ones overlooked, despised or flung to the side by the powerful. Yet there is little doubt that Daenerys, that once abandoned and abused child, will eventually come to the aid of Westeros. The only question is which of the other misfits and beggars will accompany her on her dragons in a reversal of her ancestor Aegon's conquest? (My guess, for what its worth, is Jon [Targaryen?] Snow and Tyrion.)

It is in weakness and vulnerability that Martin reveals the strength and hope of the world, which is where he shares sympathies not only with Tolkien but also with the Apostle Paul, who asserted that "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are" (1 Corinthians 1:27-28).

Nowhere is the salvific power of affliction more evident than in Martin's narrative redemption of Jamie Lannister. At the end of the first season (and book) of the series, few characters seem more despicable than "the Kingslayer." The one who betrayed his vows as a Kingsguard for political gain, who incestuously fathered three children by his sister, and who pushed 10-year-old Bran from a tower crippling him for life, Jamie Lannister would appear to have, as he and many others comment, "shit for honor." Yet in the third season something rather remarkable happens: Jamie is maimed and loses his sword hand and, with it, his identity and sense of purpose. But in this unexpected state of extreme vulnerability, he begins to reveal himself to Brienne and to us as someone who has paid the price for making difficult and courageous choices that likely saved all of King's Landing but were branded as acts of cowardice and betrayal. Stripped of the armor and identity he has used to protect himself from those slights for so long, he begins to see the world from the point of view of the marginalized, and when he rides back to Harrenhal to save Brienne we recognize that he has also been saved himself.

One might think that this kind of agnostic "theology of the cross" would be appealing to those who follow a crucified messiah, one cast aside by the religious authorities and executed by the political powers. But for those who embrace a version of Christianity where salvation is understood as the triumphant restoration of order, the crucifixion is only the first stage of a larger and more glorious plan. For some of us Christians, however, crucifixion is not a first step in, but rather the pattern of, God's activity. From this point of view, the cross invites us to expect God to show up always and only where we least expect God to be -- with the weak, the broken and the oppressed.

Just as the vulnerability and anguish of the cross becomes the archetype for all of God's redemptive work in the Christian drama, so also rejection, suffering and loss are the marks of possible redemption in Martin's magisterial work of fantasy. It may be that precisely in this world of many and competing religions and cultures we can hear this message most clearly. If so, this won't be a first, as it is in Shakespeare's pre-Christian England that King Lear discovers the power of sacrificial love only when he has been stripped of all he once deemed valuable. Similarly, in Martin's complex and somewhat relativistic world, Jamie, Jon, Daenerys, Tyrion, Brienne, Bran, Arya and even "the hound" Sandor Clegane (who will emerge, I suspect, as a significant and self-sacrificing character in a future installment) become the chief protagonists because they are the ones who know the value of love and loyalty, mercy and compassion because that is all that is left to them. As in the Christian narrative, so also in Martin's world: there is more to this story than meets the eye and hope often emerges from unexpected quarters

This, then, is the gospel of "A Game of Thrones": that power is found paradoxically in vulnerability, that compassion and mercy are peculiarly stronger than judgment and might, and that, much to the surprise of everyone, the weak shall not only inherit but actually save the earth. So if we do not at first detect in Martin's universe a reliable moral vision, perhaps it is because we misapprehend morality as a consistent way of acting, rather than as a way of being in the world that exposes ourselves to the needs of others and discovers our common humanity in our shared vulnerability. I suspect that the unlikely heroes of Westeros will discover this in time to prevail against the powers that threaten to tear their world asunder. The more pressing question, I believe, is whether we will.

]]>Pope Francis and the New Pluralismtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33501152013-05-29T11:18:09-04:002013-07-29T05:12:01-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/said -- in a sermon last week that Jesus Christ redeems all: those who are Roman Catholic and those who are not. Those who believe, and those who don't. Christians, atheists, the whole kit and caboodle.

While it's perhaps understandable that the pope's statement got a lot of attention -- he is the pope, after all, and one can hardly imagine his predecessor saying anything remotely like this -- as Father James Martin pointed out in an email to The Huffington Post, the idea that Jesus offered himself for all people, not just his followers, has "always been a Christian belief."

The pope went on to invite his hearers to meet others at the place of doing good works. Because all people are created in God's image, all are capable of doing good. The implication is that Christians shouldn't be surprised to find others, whether of different religions or no religion -- doing good and should be eager to partner with them.

Why this change of tone from, if not the Vatican, at least its pope? I suspect that part of it is that this pope has never separated himself off from the masses. He was famous in his native Argentina for living a simple life, even as a Cardinal, and for living among the people. And even in his heavily Roman Catholic homeland, that means he likely encountered all kinds of people -- the fervently faithful and the lukewarm, Christians and non-Christians, the pious and the irreverent.

That kind of pluralism does something to you. It's one thing to stand back and decry all those who don't believe as you do as infidels or pagans or godless or whatever zealous phrase comes to mind; it's another to say those things about people you know, work with, like and admire. We don't live in a religious ghetto anymore. We are surrounded by people who believe differently, and that makes a difference.

When I grew up, I only knew one kid who wasn't a Christian. But my kids are surrounded by children of all different faiths and many of no particular faith. These are their friends. In this kind of pluralistic world, traditional concepts of hell and damnation for everyone that is different than you seem downright, well, medieval.

Which might be the problem. Most conceptions about hell arose during a time when Christians represented not just a majority in the West but a totality and feared what they saw as the specter of Islam in the East. Crusade after crusade was conducted in the name of recapturing and protecting the "Christian world." But when it's no longer a Christian world, then what?

But while this kind of Christian triumphalism may have caught on in the Middle Ages and still hold sway in certain quarters of conservative Christianity today, as Father Martin points out, it was not part of the original story. Indeed, while Pope Francis made his statements about Christ's universal redemption in a homily on Mark 9, where his disciples tell Jesus they tried to stop a man from casting out demons because he wasn't one of them, he might just as easily been talking about the passage from Luke 7 that millions of Christians will hear read this Sunday morning. In this story, a Roman centurion sends messengers to ask Jesus to heal his servant and then says that Jesus doesn't even need to come, that he can just say the word and that will be enough.

The typical way this story is preached is to admire the centurion's faith, as Jesus seems to. "Not even in Israel have I found such faith," Jesus says in response to the message sent from the centurion. But in a commentary on the piece, Jeannine Brown observes that perhaps the point isn't the centurion's faith, but that it's a centurion who models such faith.

Such a scenario would most likely have surprised some of Luke's original audience, who read this story 30 or 40 years after the event it narrates happened. Because the one thing that hadn't changed across those decades was that Rome was still in charge, still occupying Israel, still enforcing its will upon Israelites of all ranks and stations. Which means that this centurion was one of those directly responsible for Israel's oppression.

But perhaps that's why this story was told by several of the evangelists in the first place. I mean, just because this man is in the Roman legion doesn't mean that he is incapable of doing good. Clearly he already has. Indeed, the Jewish leaders in his town commend him to Jesus on the basis of his good works.

All of which means he is more complex than perhaps many of his day or ours want to make him out. He is a Roman centurion and a man who does good for those in his community. He is part of the force occupying and oppressing Israel and he builds synagogues for the townspeople under his authority. This passage reminds us that we should never reduce someone to a single attribute or judge someone based on only one element of who they are.

And in case that's not enough, there's one more thing about this story that I find particularly arresting: We have no particularly good reason to believe the centurion becomes a follower of Jesus. I mean, he does not ask to follow Jesus or confess him as the Messiah. For that matter, he doesn't even seem particularly interested in meeting Jesus. He simply sees in Jesus authority that he recognizes and, quite frankly, needs. Maybe he becomes a disciple, maybe not. Neither Jesus nor Luke seem particularly interested in that fact. Instead, Jesus praises his astounding faith and Luke tells later Christians about it.

Unlike the world in which notions of hell and Christian exclusivism gained wide appeal, the world in which the gospels were written was also heavily pluralistic. For this reason, most if not all early Christians had family and friends who did not share their beliefs. Perhaps, then, Luke included this story to remind Jesus' follows -- then and now -- that God loves all people, intends to redeem all people and uses all people for the sake of the world God loves so much. Pope Francis, at least, got the message.]]>Is the Christmas Story Trustworthy?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23249432012-12-21T11:38:37-05:002013-02-20T05:12:02-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/one in Times Square this year reads, "Keep the Merry" underneath a picture of Santa Claus, and "Dump the Myth" below a statue of a crucified Jesus. Last year it was four pictures - Jesus, Santa, Poseidon, and the devil - with the caption "37 Million Americans know MYTHS when they see them. What myths do you see?" And in 2010, when this particular "tradition" seems to have first gained steam, it was a picture of the nativity with the banner spread below that read, "You know it's a MYTH. This season, celebrate reason."

I was reminded of that billboard when I heard about the live nativity held this past Saturday at St. Rose of Lima Parish, a Roman Catholic Church in Newtown, Connecticut. St. Rose was open the night before, the evening of the school killings, for a prayer vigil, and while they undoubtedly debated whether to go forward with their plans, they apparently decided that this story should be told in the hope that its telling might bring a measure of comfort and hope to those who most needed it. And so this past Saturday evening, parishioners gathered around a make shift stable, surrounded by various farm animals, to portray the characters of the Christmas story that culminates in the birth of Jesus in a manager with visits from shepherds, wise men, and angels.

If it's just a myth, I wondered, are they deluding themselves? Or, at the least, are they understandably but unfortunately seeking comfort from a fairy tale? I wonder.

Certainly that live nativity, like countless other crèches and manger scenes through the centuries, combine elements of Luke's and Matthew's distinct stories. Indeed, as you read them closely, it's hard to reconcile their two accounts. Luke's, for instance, focuses on Mary: the conversation she has with Gabriel, her willing participation in God's plans, and her visit with her cousin Elizabeth. Matthew, in contrast, weaves his story around Joseph: his lineage to David and Abraham, his dilemma in discovering that his intended is pregnant, his own conversation with Gabriel, and his faithful obedience to the angel's instructions.

Luke tells of shepherds and angels, while Matthew describes magi and a guiding star. Matthew narrates an escape to Egypt about which Luke seems to know nothing. And the list goes on, not just in the infancy narratives but throughout these stories that, while regularly similar, are also definitely distinct in all manner of details both great and small.

And so the question arises, are these stories that we sing and tell at this time of year trustworthy?

Notice that the question I raise is whether they are "trustworthy," not "historically accurate." That's a distinction often lost on both conservative Christians and atheists alike. We tend to conflate facts and truth, assuming that only those things that are factual are true and that if anything is true and trustworthy it must be rationally verifiable. Yet the biggest convictions and guiding truths of our lives - about the value of freedom, the importance of love, the sanctity of life - are truths that are simply too big to be proven (or disproven) in a laboratory.

So while the Pope may have a vested interest in attempting to validate the historical accuracy of the stories of Jesus' birth, I think we misunderstand their intent by doing so. The evangelists - those early Christians who wrote the gospels - were less interested in recording history - at least in the post-Enlightenment sense that we know history - than they were in making confessions of faith. Luke starts his whole endeavor, in fact, not only by admitting that he wasn't an eye-witness but also by saying that he is sorting through the various stories about Jesus floating around at the time to offer an account that has been ordered and arranged so as to confirm and strengthen the faith of his community (Luke 1:1-4).

Luke - and Matthew, Mark, and John for that matter - are playing for bigger stakes than mere historical accuracy. They are trying to share their faith far more than they are trying to establish the facts, and for this reason we should probably regard them more as artists than as historians. Yet does not art also point us to truth, often in ways that mere facts cannot?

For this reason, I would argue that while the gospel writers undoubtedly play fast and loose with the various stories, sayings, and incidents they inherited, they did so in order to craft and offer a clear and compelling confession of faith about God, us, and the world.

For instance, while there is little historical evidence of the "slaughter of the innocents" (Matt. 2:16-18; though no one doubts Herod, who murdered members of his own family, wasn't capable of such an act), this story, with its description of Rachel weeping inconsolably for her children tells the truth, the truth about all mothers and fathers who have had their children torn from their arms by war, disease, hunger or, this past weekend, by gunfire in an elementary school. Frankly, I don't know or care if it "really happened," it is nevertheless trustworthy because it captures the truth and tragedy of a world where the most vulnerable can be gunned down and families who selected and wrapped Christmas gifts with care will return them unopened. Indeed, "a voice was heard in Newtown, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

Such stories tell us the truth, the truth about the world we live in, about our capacity for good and evil, bravery and cowardice, and about the hopes and fears and tragedies of our lives. But they don't stop there. These stories of wayward magicians, outcast shepherds, and unwed teens also confess the truth that somehow, somewhere, God is mixed up in all of this. That God came in the form of a vulnerable child, born just like those children at Sandy Hook School, in order to be Emmanuel, God with us. That God in this child took on our lot and our life in order that we might have hope that where we are right now - no matter how dark or difficult - God in Jesus has already been, and that where Jesus is now, we will someday be.

Reasonable? Not on your life. But that's just the point. At the edge of reason we encounter mystery and redemption, and when the Evangelists two thousand years ago - or the parishioners and mourners of St. Rose of Lima this past weekend - tell this story we are drawn into a reality we believes stretches beyond our reality and into a story that encompasses all of our stories. A story, that is, that whether factually accurate or not is nevertheless both trustworthy and true.]]>What the Bible Says - And Doesn't Say - About Womentag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18988132012-09-22T08:02:12-04:002012-11-22T05:12:01-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/Proverbs 31 presents only one of the Bible's many complex passages on women, because it is one of this week's readings in the Revised Common Lectionary that guides the preaching of thousands of ministers, it invites discussion.

The passage describes the qualities of a "good wife" and is a favorite among Evangelicals and Fundamentalists because of its supposed affirmation of traditional gender roles. The good wife Proverbs extols, for instance, is trusted by her husband, adored by her children, works day and night to take care of her household, and even makes her own clothing.

But as New Testament scholar Brent Strawn of Emory points out, she doesn't quite conform to stereotypes about the happy homemaker. While noting the strong patriarchal bias of the passage, Strawn also notes that this wife is a successful business woman and profitable entrepreneur, excelling at various pursuits not traditionally associated with women. But even though it offers a more three-dimensional picture of a wife than we might expect from the Bible, the passage is still problematic in that it's incredibly hard to imagine when this woman ever has a chance to rest. As Strawn notes, she's "working hard everywhere, on everything, for everyone, from dawn to dusk." For a generation of women who have taken on more roles and responsibilities than ever before and yet still report never feeling like they've done enough, this ideal is not just unattainable, but also can be demoralizing.

At the same time, however, historian Amy Oden notes that perhaps what this passage doesn't say about women is as important as what it does. Oden, who serves as Academic Dean at Wesley Theological Seminary, points to three important things made conspicuous by their absence.

First, the passage "doesn't say that a wife's worth is derived from her husband." Rather, she has her own identity and integrity of being, and her value is at no point contingent on or determined by her relationship with, let alone obedience to, her husband.

Second, the passage "doesn't say anything about pregnancy or childbirth, often key credentials for womanhood in the ancient world, and still in our own in many quarters." She is, apparently, a good mother, as the passage states that "her children rise up and call her happy," but that is a far cry from assuming that the point of her being is to bear and raise children.

Third, the passage

doesn't say anything about her appearance or physical appeal. There is nothing about weight, shape, clothes, make-up or make-over, the sole topics of women's worth if current popular culture in America were to be believed. Has she achieved "younger-looking skin?" Does she "bulge in the wrong places?" Does she know "what not to wear?" We'll never know.

In this way, as Oden points out, Proverbs offers "a radical counter-cultural message," going so far as to say that "beauty is vain" (v. 29).

As the father of a twelve year-old girl, it's Proverb's focus on a woman's achievements rather than on the importance of physical appearance that I most want my daughter - and all of our wives, sisters, and daughters - to notice. Since the publication of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia first called our attention to the war on our daughters waged by a beauty-obsessed culture twenty-five years ago, things have only gotten worse. Indeed, as the following video illustrates, we have now lifted up not just an idealized version of beauty by which our daughters are invited to compare themselves, but one that is completely artificial.

Yet if Photoshop and the airbrush are powerful weapons in the campaign to create a pervading sense of inadequacy in women - so that, of course, they pay, pay, and keep paying for cosmetics promising to make them beautiful - some are raising their voices in protest. You may have read about thirteen year-old Julia Bluhm's petition to Seventeen Magazine to run one unaltered photo spread per issue. 86,000 digital signatures later, Seventeen's editor pledged that they will no longer use Photoshop to alter bodies and when technology is employed to clean up photos they will note that in the article and direct readers to the untouched photos on one of their blogs.

We need more such voices, and I'd suggest Proverbs 31 - as complex as it certainly is - might be one of them. Think about it: this Sunday countless girls will be sitting in church listening to this passage. How many will hear it interpreted not as one more ideal they can't live up to but instead as a powerful voice that invites them to imagine that they have worth in and of themselves, that they can do anything they set their minds to, and that their value rests in their character and accomplishments, not in the rosy glow of their skin. That's a sermon I hope my daughter hears. And, for that matter, my son as well.

]]>Was Jesus a Jerk?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.18622182012-09-06T18:01:07-04:002012-11-06T05:12:01-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/the seventh chapter of Mark's Gospel and also borders on disrespectful, even unseemly.

Let me set the scene. Jesus, as Mark records, wants to get away, and so he goes to visit a house in Tyre, a seaside community quite a hike from his usual haunts in Galilee. Mark tells us that he doesn't want anyone to know he's there, but a woman finds him anyway, bows down at his feet, and begs him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. And this is the exchange that follows:

He said to her, "Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." But she answered him, "Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs." Then he said to her, "For saying that, you may go -- the demon has left your daughter" (Mark 7:27-29).

Do you see what I mean? Why on earth would Jesus, the guy who has spent pretty much the rest of Mark Gospel healing anyone with so much as athlete's foot, respond to this earnest woman's plea with not just an insult, but an ethnic slur? Two possibilities suggest themselves, though neither is entirely satisfactory.

On the one hand, maybe Jesus has just had a really bad day. After all, it seems like no matter how far he goes, he can't get a break. I get that. Scarlett Johannson can't go shopping for veggies in Paris without the paparazzi following her and Jesus can't avoid nagging supplicants even in Tyre. That's the price of stardom. But it neither explains or excuses Jesus' response. This is Jesus we're talking about after all, not Alec Baldwin.

The second possibility represents the more "traditional" way of explaining this otherwise embarrassing passage and requires two interpretive moves. First, Jesus doesn't call her a dog, but rather a puppy. He's being affectionate, not insolent. You know, like "sorry little puppy, but it's just not your time yet." Second, Jesus isn't insulting her, he's testing her, resisting her request in order to stretch her faith.

Taken together, this interpretive move -- similar to some of the gymnastic performances we recently saw at the London Olympics -- doesn't persuade me. After all, not only is translating the word "puppy" a tad dubious -- it is as likely to refer to a small house dog as it is to denote affection -- I still don't see how it solves the problem. I mean, whether "puppy" or "dog," it's still a pretty obnoxious thing to call a desperate mom who's come seeking your help. (And let's be frank, you don't think often hear a man call a woman "a female dog" in a kind way.) As for the possibility that this nasty exchange is really a test, if it is it would be the singular example of this kind of faith-quiz in Mark. And besides, why should this desperate woman, who's already demonstrated her great faith by coming to Jesus alone, bowing at his feat and beseeching him for healing (demonstrating her belief that Jesus can, in fact, heal her daughter), be tested at all, let alone in such a demeaning way?

As much as I don't buy the traditional interpretation, however, I do understand why it's appealing: it preserves the picture of Jesus many believers hold in their hearts -- perfect in compassion, foreknowledge, courage and love. And if this were John's Gospel, where Jesus comes off something like the newest member of the Avengers, I'd be inclined to buy it. But this is Mark, the one who shows us Jesus so vulnerable in Gethsemane and so desperate on the cross.

So maybe, just maybe, Jesus responds as he does not because he's tired, or conducting an exercise in growing your faith, or because he had a really bad day. Maybe he just hasn't realized yet how expansive is God's kingdom and how all-inclusive is God's grace. Maybe it's only now -- confronted by the boldness of this foreign woman -- that it's dawning on Jesus that there is no wrong time to ask God's help and no group of persons excluded from beseeching God's mercy.

If so, then I think we should give thanks for this desperate mother and her fierce parental love, as she simultaneously stretches Jesus' conception of what his mission is about as well as offers us a dramatic picture of God's tenacious commitment to love all of God's children, no matter how unseemly such love may seem.

So is Jesus being a jerk here? I don't think so. Rather, I think that he's being human, like us, and in and through his encounter with this woman he grows into a deeper, richer vision of the measure of God's kingdom and love, a vision he is ultimately willing to die for. If so, then perhaps we -- the pious, impious and indifferent alike -- can learn from Jesus both to be prepared to be surprised by God's unrelenting grace and to learn from those who at first glance seem so different yet have the capacity to introduce us to a larger vision of both heaven and earth.]]>Is America a Christian Nation?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16463892012-07-03T11:39:46-04:002012-09-02T05:12:16-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/
On the one hand, those who argue against the proposition point to several key pieces of evidence. First, many if not most of the Founders of the country cannot be described accurately as Christians but as Deists, persons who believe that a benevolent Creator set the world in motion but no longer intervenes in it. Indeed, Washington would never publicly admit to being a Christian and Jefferson was regularly accused of being hostile to Christianity and famously took his scissors to the Bible to cut out any incidences of divine interaction.

Further, the United States has always been home to a multitude of faith traditions and, indeed, was imagined from the beginning to be a religious haven. The first of the Amendments to The U.S. Constitution, collectively known as the "Bill of Rights," states clearly that, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This not only guaranteed freedom of belief but also ensured that no single religion would be given privileges over others.

So on both historical and constitutional grounds, you can argue strongly that America is definitely not a Christian nation.

At the same time, though, it's difficult to contend that any faith has exercised even close to the amount of influence that Christianity has. The first universities in the country -- including most of what we now call the "Ivy League" -- were established to train Christian clergy. An overwhelming number of welfare institutions from hospitals and orphanages to immigration and refugee services were established by churches. For many years, church attendance was considered a cultural value, and while that has waned in recent decades in some parts of the country, belief in God -- and usually this means the Christian God -- still runs high.

Further, whatever the current church-going habits or religious beliefs of the population, Americans adorn themselves in religious imagery and language, from the motto "in God we trust" on our money to the "so help me God" that Washington improvised in his acceptance of the presidency. Indeed, it's hard today to imagine a candidate for our highest office closing a major speech with any words other than "God bless America." As Darrin Grinder, author of "The Presidents and Their Faith," says in a recent CNN interview, "It's going to be a long time before anyone who openly admits that he or she is an agnostic or an atheist is elected."

For these reasons, those who support the notion of a "Christian America" can convincingly argue that the de facto stance of this country has been to privilege the belief of, if not simply Christianity, at least what's often called "the Judeo-Christian tradition" because of its central place in this nation's evolution.

Beyond how one answers this question, however, two elements of the debate are worth noting. The first is the energy, even ferocity, behind the answers people on either side of the divide give. There is much at stake, it would seem, in identifying America as either Christian or pluralistic. This seems particularly, and somewhat paradoxically, true of believers who want to "keep God in America," but overlook Jesus' words "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36) or his admonition to "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's" (Mark 12:7, Matt. 22:21, Luke 20:25). Given their belief that God founded America and indeed has given it a privileged place in the history of the world, conservative Christians often act as if a pluralistic America is tantamount to sacrilege. Christian belief and American identity are for many interwoven so tightly that we might with good reason describe the prevailing religion of this country "Americanity."

Those who oppose identifying the United States as Christian are hardly less vehement. Such an identification runs the risk not only of betraying our constitutional heritage, they argue, but of inviting a theocracy in which the rights of persons who hold "minority" faiths or no faith at all are jeopardized. Influenced by Jefferson's more absolute sense of "the wall of separation between church and state," they take the first amendment not as admonition to protect religious freedom from the interference of government but instead to protect government from religion.

Beyond the passion each position exhibits for their views, however, what interests me even more is the tendency of both sides to overlook the biblical implications of claiming God's divine providence. Throughout the Bible, Israel enjoyed not only special favor but significant responsibility because of its relationship with God. The promise made to Abraham, the principal forebear of both Judaism and Christianity, involves both blessing and duty: "I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing" (Genesis 12:2).

While presidents invoking God's blessing on America may neglect the biblical sensibility that we are always "blessed to be a blessing," early religious leaders in the United States did not. John Winthrop, one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a sermon in which he imagined America as a "city set upon a hill." But while presidents since, most particularly Ronald Reagan, took that image to establish a divine exceptionalism for this country, Winthrop himself believed that America would be blessed by God only to the degree that it followed God's ordinances.

And what are those ordinances? The prophet Micah answers as clearly as any: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (6:8). Israel is again and again admonished to care for the poor and warned that they will be judged not simply, or even primarily, on their religious practices but on their treatment of the vulnerable. Indeed, religious practice apart from acts of mercy is rejected by God as false piety. As Amos warns those who "lie on beds of ivory and ... eat lambs from the flock," while others go hungry (6:4-6):

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (5:21-24)

Here is religious devotion more than ample to satisfy the pious cravings of anyone from the right that is simultaneously anchored in a social consciousness that would warm the cockles of the heart of anyone on the left.

So perhaps on this Fourth of July when we celebrate and give thanks for the liberties and luxuries that citizenship in this nation affords, the question both religious and secular alike might ask is not, "Is America a Christian nation?'" but rather, "What would it be like if America acted like one?"

Note: This contents of this post first appeared at the website "...In the Meantime."]]>Do Christian Denominations Have a Future?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16162332012-06-22T11:28:24-04:002012-08-22T05:12:22-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/
In fact, here are five reasons that I not only suspect the day of denominations has passed but also can't seem to find it in me to shed many tears about it.

1) Denominations are incredibly confusing in a post-Christian world. When the larger culture was nominally Christian, believers had the luxury of squaring off behind denominational identities. No longer. Ask the typical person with little or no familiarity with the Christian faith the difference between Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians and she'll likely give you a blank stare that indicates she's wondering whether you're still talking about Christianity. The facts of the matter are pretty straightforward, if not that encouraging: most people in the various denominations have little sense what they mean and absolutely no one outside them really cares.

2) The theological differences between the major denominations are relatively minor. As much as I love a good real-presence vs. memorial-feast slugfest or round of justification/sanctification truth-or-dare, the truth is that most of the theological differences between denominations not only are unintelligible to their own members but are, in the larger scheme of things, relatively minor. Across the board, the major Protestant denominations, for instance, share a biblical canon, confess the major ecumenical creeds, and observe the same two sacraments. I therefore can -- and regularly do -- worship at churches of any of the major denominations and feel not the slightest tremor in my theological conscience.

3) Inordinate amounts of funding are spent on maintaining denominational structures and bureaucracies, money that could be spent on mission. Even though every denomination I know has in recent years cut way back on spending, eliminated various divisions or boards, or extended the times between major assemblies or conventions, denominations are still expending vast sums of money to prop up dated denominational bureaucracies. Would it not make sense to conserve resources by efficiently combining structures? Are seven or eight struggling denominational publishing houses better than one robust one? Where there are three beleaguered denominational seminaries in a single region, might not one healthy pan-denominational school suffice? (And we haven't even started on congregations!) Think of what might happen if the savings were channeled to funding creative media campaigns that didn't extol the virtues of one denomination but taught the Christian faith.

4) Political differences outstripped theological ones decades ago. Let's face it: progressive Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian congregations have a lot more in common than do progressive and conservative congregations in the same tradition. Differences over how to read the Bible, the nature of the atonement, and the character of God are far more important today than nuanced differences in polity or regarding the sacraments.

5) Denominational affiliation often represents the triumph of ethnic and cultural loyalties over theological convictions. While denominations may have initially arisen over theological differences, they were soon co-opted by the political realities of their sponsoring state. Little wonder, then, that ethnic and cultural identity is closely tied to denominational affiliation. Those in the club, after all, talk not simply of Presbyterians and Lutherans but Scotch Presbyterians and Swedish or German Lutherans. This has always made it difficult to reach beyond one's ethnic enclave because interested seekers, even if they were attracted to, for instance, Lutheran theology, had to accept it in the form of German chorales or Swedish traditions. Moreover, as ethnic culture has declined as an important identity-maker, so also has religious affiliation -- after all, for many folks, if Lutheranism isn't about Santa Lucia, what is it about? And if they've stopped going to the Santa Lucia festival, why bother with church?

The bottom line is this: while I love my denominational heritage and am all for a robust theological identity and spirited theological conversation, I'd give up denominational identity and structure in a heartbeat if it meant a more unified, comprehensible, and compelling witness to the Gospel.

This makes some of my tribe, I know, rather nervous. But lest we imagine that denominations are, like the Holy Trinity, one of those things that, "always have been, are, and forever will be," perhaps a few words from one of the original Reformers will ease our fears. Just a few years into what would eventually be called the Protestant reformation, some of the followers of Martin Luther began to take his name for their cause. Luther, however, was neither amused nor pleased. In 1522 he wrote the following in a public treatise:

I ask that people make no reference to my name; let them call themselves Christians, not Lutherans. What is Luther? After all, the teaching is not mine. Neither was I crucified for anyone.... How then should I -- poor stinking maggot-fodder than I am -- come to have people call the children of Christ by my wretched name? Not so, my dear friends; let us abolish all party names and call ourselves Christian.

Not a bad idea, if you ask me. In fact, if denominations have a future, perhaps it rests precisely in taking the counsel of their founders to heart.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared at the website ...In the Meantime.]]>Is God Angry At You? A Good Friday Reflectiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13869022012-04-06T08:40:09-04:002012-06-06T05:12:01-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/penal-substitution theory of atonement," this understanding of the cross pictures God as a cosmic king who demands and deserves perfect obedience from God's servants, i.e., humanity. When humanity sins, they -- make that we -- deserve punishment. Which puts God in a bind, because God isn't just any king, God is a loving king and doesn't desire the death of God's subjects. So while God would like to forgive us out of love, God simply can't, because to do so would be to violate God's own justice.

The way out of this bind is, to borrow terminology popularized by the 11th century theologian Anselm of Canterbury, the "god-man," Jesus Christ. Because Jesus is human, he can serve as a substitute for humanity. Because Jesus is also God, he is perfect, sinless, satisfies God's demands, and his substitution has cosmic significance. So Jesus the God-man saves us by voluntarily substituting himself for guilty humanity and receives the punishment for sin we deserve. We, in turn, having had our debt paid, can again receive God's love and salvation by acknowledging Jesus' sacrifice for us.

This understanding of the cross is so popular, I believe, because it is so terribly rational. You can understand it in legal terms -- justice must be served and the just punishment for the offense is death; hence, Jesus "dies for us." Or you can approach it in accounting terms -- sinful humanity has amassed such a deficit that only a major sacrifice can ever pay the debt owed God. Either way, all the pieces fit.

Despite its popularity, however, it also begs several huge questions. First, and as Andrew Sullivan recently asked, why should one person's punishment -- even if that person is the Son of God -- count for all others? Doesn't that essentially negate the idea of personal responsibility? And if it's true that Jesus has endured punishment for all sins that have been or ever will be committed, why wouldn't we be motivated to sin all the more knowing that the penalty has already been paid?

Second, can you really call it forgiveness if someone else had to pay? If I fall behind on my mortgage payments and the bank wants to foreclose, but someone else steps forward to pay my balance, the bank hasn't actually forgiven me anything; it just found someone else to pay. Forgiveness is releasing someone's debt, not distributing it to another.

Third, what kind of picture of God does the penal-substitution theory construct? Anslem's original theory, developed around the beginning of the second millenium, revolved around a feudal sense of honor and cosmic balance. The death of the innocent Son satisfies the divine right to recompense for the offense against God's honor caused by human sin and restores balance to the moral universe. During the later middle ages the concern shifted from honor to justice and punishment, Jesus serving as something of a divine whipping boy. Later still, and now on North American soil, the theory has developed further to emphasize God's wrath as motivation for repentance. Baptist preacher John Piper has a whole collection of sermons on God's wrath available on his website, while Evangelical enfant terrible Mark Driscoll goes even further, telling congregants:

Some of you, God hates you. Some of you, God is sick of you. God is frustrated with you. God is wearied by you. God has suffered long enough with you. He doesn't think you're cute. He doesn't think it's funny. He doesn't think your excuse is "meritous" [sic]. He doesn't care if you compare yourself to someone worse than you, He hates them too. God hates, right now, personally, objectively hates some of you.

God, from this point of you, is just plain pissed at humans and the only thing that will appease God's anger is punishment. While advocates of the penal-substitution theory emphasize that God sends the Son to take the beating we deserve out of love, the fact remains that God can't act toward humanity in a loving way until blood has been shed. (And, in fact, precisely because God punishes God's own Son, some progressive critics name penal-substitution cosmic child abuse.)

In addition to these questions, the major problem with this understanding of God and the cross is that it enjoys relatively little support from the biblical witness. In particular, note that Jesus doesn't wait until after his sacrifice on the cross to offer God's forgiveness; in fact, it's the very fact that Jesus goes all over the place announcing God's forgiveness that riles up his opponents in the first place. Again and again, people take exception to Jesus' declaration that "your sins are forgiven," at various points questioning his authority or accusing him of blasphemy (Mark 2:1-12)

In a book I wrote recently called Making Sense of the Cross, I suggest that Jesus didn't come to make God loving but because God is loving. Jesus didn't die, that is, to appease a pissed-off deity. Rather, threatened by the wild, uncontrollable, and unconditional love and forgiveness of God Jesus proclaimed, the political and religious authorities put Jesus to death to quash the hope he created and retain their power. Forgiveness, you see, presumes guilt, and rather than admit their guilt they executed the one offering forgiveness. But God vindicated Jesus' message by raising him from the dead (something notoriously under-emphasized by substitution theologians), demonstrating that such self-giving love is more powerful than hate and that God's promise of life is stronger than death. From this point of view, God in Jesus joins us in absolute solidarity by taking on our lot and our life, even to the point of death, and at the same time promises that death does not have the last word; that, in the end, life and love win. No wrath, no anger, no horrendous punishment or logic-bending substitution schemes necessary.

So, given an alternative, why such devotion to penal-substitution? First, it appeals to a crude sense of justice achieved through retributive violence. Theologians defending penal substitution almost always invite us to imagine that if our house were broken into, or if someone we loved were murdered, we'd want justice -- that is, that the offender would be punished. But this argument assumes God can't transcend our own moral limitations. Just because we may cry for justice and vengeance when we are wronged doesn't mean God will. Further, groups like the Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa have modeled the possibility and power of forgiveness in the face of even horrific violence. So my question to those advocating penal substitution would be this: is a God with as limited moral vision as I may have in the heat of rage and grief really worth worshiping?

What evangelical preachers don't suggest is that we live this way: recording each and every slight, demanding recompense for every offense against us. Why? Because it would drive you crazy in a day. Can you imagine treating your children, parents, spouse, or friends this way? Justice should always be a concern in our social interactions, of course, but there is more than one way to imagine just relationships than retributive violence and, ultimately, relationships that flourish are characterized even more by forgiveness and grace.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, the penal-substitution theory of atonement reduces the mystery of salvation to a formula. The wild and uncontrollable love of God becomes not just understandable, but manageable, even predictable. Evangelical pastor and blogger Tim Challies is typical in asserting recently that God must punish sin. As if the God who created light out of darkness and raises the dead to life isn't free to forgive or, for that matter, can't manage what every one of us does on a fairly regular basis -- forgive those who have hurt us.

What's at stake in this second concern, I think, is that the penal-substitution theory promotes the seductive illusion that we know just how God works and can therefore determine who enjoys God's favor. The tricky thing about the God Jesus proclaimed, however, is that pretty much whenever you draw a line between who's in and who's out, you'll find this God on the other side of the line. When Jesus came preaching and teaching that God's love was boundless and then demonstrated it by socializing with those people the religious and political authorities knew were despised by God, they crucified him for daring to declare the unlovable beloved and the God-forsaken saved. Two thousand years later, advocates of penal-substitution risk doing it all over again, this time hanging him on a theology of wrath, punishment, and a barbaric sense of justice.]]>What Does The Bible Really Say About Love?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12711442012-02-13T14:41:39-05:002012-04-14T05:12:01-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/
Describing a biblical view of love turns out to be no simple matter. First off, the Bible was written in both Hebrew and Greek, and each of these languages has multiple words that we translate as "love." (On this count, Hebrew wins out with about a dozen words expressing a range of emotions from sexual desire to intimate friendship, and from covenantal fidelity to acts of mercy and kindness.)

There are also understandings of love floating around among different authors. So what the author of the Song of Solomon says about love isn't the same as what the author(s) of Genesis say, which isn't the same as what John says, which isn't the same as Paul ... and so on. All of which means that not only is there no single view of love in the Bible but any larger scheme you propose by which to organize these various treatises on love will inevitably fall short.

Nevertheless it may still be a useful, if far from perfect, endeavor. To get at it, I'll borrow the classic formula that distinguishes between three Greek words: eros, romantic, passionate love, from which we get our word "erotic"; phileo, the love of great friends and siblings, from which we get "Philadelphia," the "city of brotherly love"; and agape, parental, self-sacrificing love that seeks only the welfare of the other. All three kinds of love are represented in the Bible, which means that all three are considered to be created and blessed by God.

Eros is the emotion we probably think of first when thinking of love, especially the love of Valentine's Day and pop music. While the word itself is not present in the Greek New Testament, it depicts the passionate desire that unites lover and beloved praised in the Song of Solomon. Its presence in the Bible testifies not only that humans are moved by beauty and desire, but also that passion, romance, and sexual intimacy are an essential element of God's good creation and the human experience.

Phileo, in contrast, is a more stable and constant emotion. Constancy not withstanding, however, phileo it is also a powerful emotion that captures the love of great friends. Jesus weeps for Lazarus, whom he loved (phileo) (John 11:35), while Jonathan and David share a bond so strong that it induces Jonathan to forsake allegiance to his father in support of his beloved friend. Phileo is ultimately not about passion as much as it is about commitment, the love that binds one to another in enduring friendship.

Agape dominates the New Testament but is more rare in contemporary literature of the Greek-speaking world of the first century. Scholars agree that it best captures what we might call "Christian love." Agape depicts the self-sacrificing love of a parent for a child and describes both God's love for the world as shown in Christ and the love Christians should show each other and all people. As to the former, think of Tim Tebow's - and, indeed, the world's - favorite Bible verse: "For God so loved - agape - the world that he gave his only Son..." (John 3:16). As to the latter, think of Paul's great hymn to love: "Love - agape - is patient and kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends" (1 Cor. 13:4-8a).

As nice and neat as these distinctions are, however, as soon as you make them you begin to watch them unravel. For many have wondered if Jonathan's friendship with David was not tinged with a hint of eros even as it also embodies the self-sacrificing love of agape. And, truth be told, agape and phileo are often used interchangeably in the New Testament. Jesus, as it turns out, loves Lazarus in terms of both phileo (John 11:35) and agape (11:5). And while Paul at points depicts marriage as a remedy for the consuming, burning passions of sexual desire we associate with eros (1 Cor. 7:9), he - or at least his disciples - also expect husbands and wives to exhibit agape for each other by being subject to each other as Christ loved and sacrificed himself for the Church (Ephesians 5). What, then, are we to make of "love" in the Bible?

But maybe this somewhat blurry picture of love suits the complicated nature of the subject at hand. I mean, even Valentine's Day itself has a peculiar and complex history. Originally named for a saint (or saints, depending on the tradition) that were martyred for their commitment to their faith, over the centuries Valentine's Day came to epitomize the romantic ardor of lovers represented by the Roman god of desire, Cupid (the Romanized version of the Greek god Eros). And today one might be forgiven for thinking that V-Day is mainly about love for chocolate and lingerie.

Perhaps, then, the Bible's convoluted treatment is fitting. After all, isn't this mixture of emotions and motivations pretty representative of our experience? We love our partners and our children and our pets and friend and, if we're lucky, our jobs and hobbies and much more, but not all in the same way. And even our love for a single person varies and changes, not just over the years, but over the span of moments, as passion can turn to tenderness, which can turn to a desire to protect and serve, and then turn back to desire, all between the beats of a simultaneously fickle and courageous heart. In light of this, maybe the best we can say is that love in the Bible, like love in our everyday lives, is important, complicated, and at times a bit squishy. That is, it is too powerful and mysterious to be fully defined or grasped by any of us.

So perhaps for now it's enough to recognize that all the different kinds of love we have explored are part and parcel of our life in this world, that God created and blessed them for our nurture, and that behind and beyond all of our expressions of love is God's love for each of us. That's not everything we could say, of course, but I think that if we get that much straight we've probably gotten the heart of what the Bible has to say about love.]]>Atheists and the F-Wordtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.12438682012-02-06T11:27:22-05:002012-04-07T05:12:01-04:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/whether atheism had become a religion. Fifteen hundred (mostly) angry comments later, I realized few saw the humor. My primary goal in that post actually wasn't to convince anyone that atheism had, in fact, become an established religion, but rather to suggest that both those who believe in God and those who don't share more in common than they might suspect and therefore perhaps should enter into more productive conversation, not just about their differences but about our life together in this world we share.

In this light, it's been interesting to see the reaction to the TED Talk given by noted philosopher and atheist Alain de Botton, Atheism 2.0. In it, he argues that atheists have a lot to learn from religions, including the importance of tradition, marking time through ritual, setting up systems of education by which to teach their views, and creating sacred space, among other things. Along these lines, he is working to create a cathedral for atheists and wants to promote a version of atheism that is more respectful of religions that it nevertheless resolutely disagrees with.

While some see de Botton as an innovator and others view him as an iconoclast, I think he's only just gotten started. In fact, I hope that what comes next from de Botton and others is not just an admission but an open affirmation that atheists also have faith. Using the F-word with atheists, of course, is tricky. (What else did you think the F-word could be, by the way?) Typically, there is the assumption that "faith" can only mean belief in a particular deity, something atheists adamantly deny. But I think it's high time we take broader view of faith.

In fact, I'd argue that believing in God -- or not -- is only the first, and perhaps the easiest, element of faith. The rest deals with how one acts in the world as a result of this initial belief. That is, once you stop arguing about whether God exists or not, you've got a life to live, a life that will call for many and various decisions and actions. Those decisions and actions, in turn, spring from a worldview and system of values grounded on a lot less evidence than we might suspect.

Let's say, for instance, that you are convinced God does not exist because there is no empirical evidence for a deity and, in fact, a lot that mitigates against it. Futher, you believe that science, or at least critical reason, should be our only standard for assessing our world and evaluating claims to truth. Fair enough. But sooner or later you still have to make decisions that come from a value system that no critically rational system can fully evaluate or validate. For instance, how do you legitimate ethical decisions like distributing wealth or hoarding it, or on what basis do you promote self-advancement or discourage it? How do you assess the relative merits of honor over disgrace, courage over cowardice? How do you decide whether to disavow the brutality of a Stalin or affirm the non-violence of a Gandhi? How, ultimately, do you measure the value of a human life or determine what is worth striving and sacrificing for? Theoretical questions? Maybe, but the values that are betrayed in answering them shape most of the important decisions we make.

And that's just the point: the values that guide both our everyday and extraordinary ethical decisions are just that: values, not facts. Values aren't empirical data about what is, but rather philosophical or religious speculation about what should be. Values, that is, can be described, even evaluated with regard to the degree to which they conform to a larger philosophical or religious system. But they can't be measured or validated empirically apart from the system from which they spring. That is, there is no objective standard (the hallmark of rational critical inquiry) by which to legitimate one value system over another. So while you can certainly pose a rationally critical system by which to describe and defend values, you can never prove them by objective means.

Please don't hear me wrong. I'm not saying that atheistic systems of ethics cannot be admirable, indeed beautiful. I believe they can. Nor am I arguing that you have to believe in God to develop ethics, a position countless believers have advanced but that I don't think is sustainable. (To see a worthy attempt, though, read Glenn Tinder's 1989 Atlantic article, "Can We Be Good without God?") What I am saying is that any construction of a system of values demands at least a modicum of faith, the assertion of and belief in some grounding principles that cannot be objectively and rationally established. If this is the case, then I would implore both religious believers and Atheists alike to get over the endless bickering over whether God exists and get on with serious discussions about the important, practical, and daily life-and-death decisions about how we will live in this world together.

If we do, we wouldn't be the first. More than half a century ago, in a world still greatly overshadowed by the terror and horror of World War II manifested in the torture and execution of millions of men, women, and children, Albert Camus was invited by a group of French Dominican monks to tell them what non-Christians expect of Christians. Hesitant about telling Christians how they should act based on convictions he didn't share, Camus nevertheless suggested that even should they not be able to eradicate evil, they could at least work together not to add to it: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And," he continued, "if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us to do this?" (From "The Unbeliever and Christians," 1948, in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.)

Here is a voice calling us, I think, to a deeper understanding of faith, one that moves well beyond arguments for or against God and focuses instead on the concrete needs of people that the religious, at their best, name the children of God. Might we do the same? In a world where women, men, and children still suffer needlessly, can we afford not to?]]>Need Help With Your New Year's Resolutions?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11772682012-01-04T13:25:14-05:002012-03-05T05:12:02-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/Pick One
The first step in making a dent in your New Year's list of dos and don'ts might just be to chuck the list itself. According to Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their new book Willpower, it's incredibly difficult to make a change in more than one area of your life at a time. Why? Because each of us has only a limited supply of willpower at any given time, and we deplete our store whenever we try to ward off some temptation or persevere in some new virtue. That means that resisting the cookies at the office all day makes it incredibly difficult not to light up on your break. So choose which habit you want to quit first, and conserve your willpower for that priority. Only after that task doesn't tax you anymore (and odds are you'll know), can you then move to a new resolution.

Be Careful Whom You Tell
As Derek Sivers shares in a succinct TED Talk, it's often better to keep your goals to yourself. Counter to our intuition, sharing our aspirations with others doesn't encourage us to persevere or keep us accountable. Instead, the immediate gratification we receive from others congratulating us on our lofty ambitions substitutes for the delayed gratification of actually achieving them. Sure, the good vibes we get when we tell our friends we plan to take up swimming in the new year isn't the same as the great feeling of having a leaner body and better endurance. But it's close enough to make it that much harder to do the hard work of dragging ourselves to the pool every morning. If you really need to tell someone, enlist that person to help keep you accountable by, for instance, checking in weekly on how you're doing. Better yet, find someone to partner with you in your new endeavor, as the camaraderie and mutual encouragement you give each other will strengthen your resolve greatly.

Imitate Santa
Whatever you may think constitutes "naughty and nice," there's little doubt about the power of "making a list and checking it twice." Checklists are effective for at least three reasons. 1) Writing things down, as Baumeister and Tierney point out, allows you to take all kinds of good but often scattered thoughts and intentions and organize them, reducing stress and conserving energy to accomplish your goals rather than worry about them. 2) As surgeon and author Atul Gwande writes in The Checklist Manifesto, lists allow you to break up large, complex tasks into smaller and more reasonable chunks of work that can guide your actions even during the most stressful of circumstances. 3) Checklists also give you the satisfaction of making demonstrable progress on your project. As Martin Seligman has pointed out in a host of books on "positive psychology," nothing substitutes for building self-confidence and greater resolve than actually accomplishing something. Striking off even small items on your list increases your confidence to take on larger tasks. To enjoy all of these benefits, however, the items on your list have to be written as specific actions, not larger goals or outcomes. So whereas writing "start diet" is a recipe for failure, breaking that into "choose a diet program," "make a food list," "go to the store" and "plan for time for cooking in my daily routine" can jumpstart your efforts.

While even the best research can't make modifying habits easy -- sustained change takes time and effort -- your chances of success increase markedly as you pick one goal, enlist help rather than announce your intentions and get organized and hold yourself accountable by using checklists. Who knows: Armed with the latest research and counsel, perhaps 2012 will be your best year yet.

For more on success and motivation, click here.]]>The Absurdity of Christmastag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11518332011-12-22T07:37:04-05:002012-02-21T05:12:02-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/Christmas is, to put it kindly, a myth. Struck. Not offended or angered. Just struck.

The gist of the advertisements is essentially that there is little to no proof that Christmas -- either as we imagine it or as narrated in the New Testament -- ever happened and that, further, belief in God in general, let alone God incarnate in a baby born in Bethlehem, is foolish at best and more likely downright absurd. And here's the thing that strikes me: They may be right.

I know that many Christians find this possibility to be nearly unthinkable, but there it is: Only two of the four canonical gospels describe Jesus' birth, and they are markedly different. Whereas Matthew's story focuses on Joseph and the political machinations around Jesus' birth, Luke concentrates instead on Mary and the appearance of angels to lowly shepherds. Mark, by contrast, starts his story with an adult Jesus and mentions his family only in passing, while John takes a decidedly theological turn by penning what would become the key verses behind Christian reflection on the Incarnation: "In the beginning the Word was with God, and the Word was God" and "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:1, 14).

Today's atheists are not the first to doubt such sentiments. In the centuries before the Enlightenment, when atheism was less common (most people believed in some kind of God or gods), skepticism centered on the unseemliness of a deity become human. The second-century Gnostic Christian Marcion, for instance, preferred to imagine Jesus as a kind of super-angel rather than stomach the idea that the holy God would deign to be joined to frail and fickle human flesh. His views, wildly popular at the time, drew an unlikely opponent in the monk Tertullian of Carthage. "Come, then, start with the birth itself," Tertullian wrote,

the object of aversion, and run through your catalogue: the filth of the generative seeds within the womb, of the bodily fluid and blood; the loathsome, curdled lump of flesh which has to be fed for nine months off this same muck. ... Undoubtedly you are also horrified at the infant, the infant which has been brought into the world together with its after birth.

Pretty strong language for an ascetic monk! And, truth be told, as Tertullian goes on, it's hard not to sympathize with Marcion, as all this does seem a bit beneath the dignity of any self-respecting God. But then Tertullian gets down to business: "You repudiate such veneration of nature, do you," he asks, "but how were you born?" And there is Tertullian's point all along. If human birth is too messy or mucky for God, then so are we. Yet the God Tertullian worships is joined to God's beloved creation in the Incarnation precisely to share our lot and our life. A thousand years later, John Calvin will call this scandal God's "condescension." Unseemly? No question. But as Tertullian, Calvin and others have pointed out across the centuries, those in love will often condescend to crazy acts to gain the attention and affection of the beloved.

Today, of course, the concern isn't that the Incarnation is unseemly but rather that it -- and, indeed, any belief in God -- seems so incredibly unlikely, even phenomenally improbable. Again, I'm sympathetic. There is little to no evidence that can stand rational scrutiny that God exists, let alone that this same God not only knows that you and I exist but actually gives a damn, caring passionately about our ups and downs, successes and failures, hopes and fears. More than that, there would seem to be so much evidence in our war-torn and strife-ridden world to the contrary that belief in such a God seems not just extraordinary but downright absurd.

And that, for some, is just the point. Looking around, some of us see a world and humanity soaked in equal measures of beauty and brokenness, hope and disappointment, glory and shame. This is a world, we confess, that cannot save itself yet deserves a savior. Or as W. H. Auden once wrote, giving desperate voice to the simultaneously hopeful and hopeless shepherds trudging their way toward Bethlehem:

We who must die demand a miracle.

How could the Eternal do a temporal act,

The Infinite become a finite fact?

Nothing can save us that is possible:

We who must die demand a miracle.

Faced with cancer, or hunger, or loneliness, or disappointment, or depression, or any of the host of other things that on any given day threaten to overwhelm us, some have perceived, or at least dared to hope, that there is a reality beyond this one, that there is a God who created, cares for, and promises to redeem us and the whole creation. While some look upon this kind of desperate faith as part wishful thinking and part emotional crutch, others perceive, with Auden, that "nothing can save us that is possible" and so look with longing and hope to what Karl Barth once named "the impossible possibility."

Which is why, I think, the billboards opposing Christmas don't really offend me. For Christians like me, you see, atheism isn't so much an offense as an understandable and occasionally tempting alternative in light of our circumstances. In an age when absolute certainty seems to be the goal, many Christians (and some atheists as well, I suspect) will likely dismiss this kind of tentative faith as weak or tepid. Yet a more temperate approach to questions of faith and doubt seems somehow to accord better with the story of a helpless babe born to a teenage mother and placed in a feeding trough. This is a story not of strength but weakness, not of certainty but of courage, not of power but of utter vulnerability.

So is the Christmas story unlikely, improbable, even absurd? Perhaps. But some of us think that the world needs such a story and is, indeed, a better place for its telling. And so we believe. We do not know for certain, but we believe, in the words of 19th century poet Christina Rosetti, that, unlikely as it may seem,

Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, love divine,

Love was born at Christmas,

Star and angels gave the sign.

]]>Is the Bible a Reliable Moral Guide?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10978002011-11-21T14:23:11-05:002012-01-21T05:12:01-05:00David Losehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-lose/write about the Bible for a living, I'm hardly the kind of person you think would ask this kind of question. But maybe it's precisely because I spend so much time with the Bible that this question occurs to me. After all, the Bible says some pretty awful stuff, and if you're going to take any of it seriously, it seems like you need to be willing to read all of it carefully.

So here's the background to my question: I've very much appreciated and learned from the series of posts by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky on what the Bible says about abortion, women and homosexuality. Their scholarly acumen and insight has helped me, and I suspect many others, to understand the context of various biblical passages better and thereby hear the biblical witness on these issues in a more nuanced and faithful way. I was struck, however, by a sentence in their opening post: "The Bible's value, above all, is as a guide to lives. And we mean to all of our lives, whether one is religious or not, whether one is Christian, Jewish, or from another religion or no religion."

My reaction to what I'm sure they believed was a relatively innocuous sentence was as unexpected as it was unbidden: Really?! Is the primary value of the Bible really as a moral guide? My mind went immediately to the many and various offenses listed in the Bible that call for the death penalty: murder and kidnapping, which perhaps shouldn't surprise, but also adultery, homosexual practice, cursing a parent, owning an animal that repeatedly attacks others, and being a "medium or wizard" -- and all this from only two chapters (Exodus 21 and Leviticus 20). And these, of course, are just capital offenses; there are numerous others that call for losing various body parts or being expelled from the community.

To be sure, there are also many important and salutary laws that we might well heed today, including caring for the most vulnerable, loving one's neighbor, releasing the debt of those overwhelmed by their obligations, always making provision for those who are poor, not taking vengeance on others, planting and harvesting in a manner that today we would call "sustainable," and not lending money in a way that disadvantages the borrower -- and all of those also from a small set of chapters. (Ex. 22-23, Lev. 19, 25). Think how different our debates about health care, relief for those facing foreclosure, agricultural policy and the regulation of banks would be if we consulted these passages.

Notice, though, that the chapters from which the "good" laws come are disturbingly close to those containing the "bad" ones. And that's just the problem: the Bible seems regularly and simultaneously to offer counsel that we deem both awful and excellent. In what way, then, can it serve as a reliable moral guide? One approach to this question -- the one followed by a majority of progressive Jewish and Christian scholars -- is to place these passages in their original context, explaining their "foreignness" so that we can either 1) understand their highly contextual nature and thereby recognize that they do not apply today or 2) re-appropriate and apply their more salutary content to our context. This approach, as Friedman and Dolansky capably demonstrate, can be tremendously productive. But at times it falls painfully short, for while it may be true that the verses calling homosexuality an abomination, for instance, should be considered temporary and contextual, one needs to question whether this law (and many others) was just at any time or under any circumstances.

What, then, are those who read the Bible to do? Shall we just pick and choose the laws and commandments that appeal to us and disregard the others? Curiously, I'm tempted to answer a qualified "yes." I do so largely because I suspect the Bible was never intended to serve primarily as a moral reference. Rather, I think that the Bible comes to us as a collection of confessions of faith of the ancient Israelites and Christians about the nature and character of God and was intended to invite readers into relationship with that God. From that relationship flows a commitment to leading a certain kind of life. Theology, that is, precedes morality, as one's view of God -- angry or loving, judgmental or gracious -- greatly influences how one relates to neighbor and world.

Even a cursory read of the Bible, however, reveals that these confessions, written over more than a thousand years, also display tremendous variety in their portrayals of God. Therefore, readers must exercise both discernment and discretion regarding which testimonies seem most helpful and trustworthy, as these critical decisions decisively shape the way one navigates and negotiates the moral instruction of the Bible. Ultimately, the passages that have been most helpful in describing the character of God fashion the critical lens through which readers make sense of and interpret the various and sundry moral commands contained throughout Scripture.

While this may sound complicated to some and dubious or even unfaithful to others, I'd contend that it has been the dominant approach to interpreting the Bible since, well, biblical times. Time and again the prophets choose one passage by which to interpret others. Amos, for instance, declares that the Lord despises all of Israel's solemn assemblies and religious sacrifices -- regarding which there are numerous laws and regulations -- because of its neglect for the poor (Amos 5:21-24). Simply put, Amos believes the passages about caring for the poor are just plain more important than those about proper worship and sacrifice. Similarly, Jesus not only states that there are two commandments -- loving God and loving neighbor -- on which all the other laws depend (Mt. 22:34-40), but also puts that interpretive prioritization into practice when he re-interprets a passage on divorce (Dt. 24:1-4) in light of another about creation (Gen. 2:24) (see Mt. 19:3-12).

Jewish and Christian clerics and interpreters have followed suit ever since. The 16th century Reformers, for instance, argued for employing a "canon within a canon," believing that the passages of the Bible that speak most clearly of God's grace and mercy provide an interpretive key to other passages. More recently, scholars have advocated using Sachkritik - German for "content criticism" -- by which one makes interpretive decisions based on the primary witness of a particular book or, indeed, the entire Bible.

Further, I'd argue that when faced with a compilation as diverse and complex as the Bible, all interpreters -- whether professional scholars, Sunday preachers, or everyday readers, and from the most conservative viewpoint to the most liberal -- are guided by what they believe to be the central and most important passages of their sacred texts. We all, that is, pick and choose to a certain extent from the variety of moral instruction in the Bible in relation to what we think is at the heart of the biblical witness. The only way to be accountable in this kind of practice is to admit that we are engaging in it in the first place in order that we can make a case for choosing one passage as primary over another and be willing to enter into conversation about, and perhaps reconsider, those choices.

How does this kind interpretive operation work? To return to our earlier example of homosexuality, one might argue that given both the relatively few verses the Bible devotes to the matter as well as the multiple and diverse understandings of sexuality present in the Bible, one might be best served by not expecting these select passages to resolve our questions. Rather, one might instead turn to other passages about communal responsibility, mutual and loving commitment, and the intricate nature of our human relationships to discern a moral framework within which to discuss these issues. Complicated work at times, even difficult? Sure, but who ever said addressing the complex ethical issues of our age should be easy?

So back to our original question: Is the Bible a reliable moral guide? If with this question we are asking whether we can look to the Bible as a kind of divine or ancient reference book, finding direct answers to today's moral questions, I'll offer a definitive "no." But if we instead wonder whether reading the Bible can lead to useful reflection on the moral life and aid one in making ethical decisions, then I'll advance a "yes" that is simultaneously bold and cautious. Bold because I believe that the Bible can be a profound guide to life, but cautious in that I want to acknowledge that that guidance often comes to us "sideways." That is, the Bible is most interested in inviting us to understand the meaning of this mysterious life we share by inviting us into relationship with God, a relationship that in turn offers counsel regarding the variety of moral choices before us. So mystery and meaning, I would argue, come before morality on the pages of Scripture.

In light of this, it may seem to many that reading the Bible for moral guidance often appears a dicey venture at best. But I nevertheless believe that those willing -- whether particularly religious or not -- to stay with this most peculiar and complicated of books and wrestle with the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly things we find on its pages will be surprised by the relevance of the Bible not only to our moral concerns, but to all the dimensions of our complex and mysterious lives.]]>